


ceiling lies

by gummyconcrete



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Bisexual Beth Harmon, Canon Bisexual Character, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Introspection, implied cunnilingus/scissoring but like. bear with me lol, the hidden scene between beth & cleo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:27:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27754573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gummyconcrete/pseuds/gummyconcrete
Summary: The room is dark.“Lie to me,” Cleo says, and her voice is far too soft for it to just be friendly.Beth’s stomach twists. The upward turn of her eyebrows, the curve of her chin gleam in the dark. Her face has always been cool angles, clean lines, smooth plains—and perhaps the flutter of her heart is a lie, the way she aches, hopes Cleo finds her beautiful.or; the hidden scene at the hotel between beth and cleo
Relationships: Cleo/Beth Harmon
Comments: 12
Kudos: 124





	ceiling lies

**Author's Note:**

> my take on the hidden/implied scene yo
> 
> i binged this show half asleep but even in the middle of all that tiredness i was like hey. this. this is good. this is important. so of course i ripped open a fresh google doc and wrote for it.

There’s whisky sour on their breaths.

 _“Let’s see how many lies they tell,”_ Cleo had said, getting up as she spoke, leaning for a moment into Beth’s space. Beth memorises the waft of perfume and the pungent hit of liquor.

Beth rubs the side of her neck with her hand, hesitates. She turns around when Cleo beckons her once more, her dark eyes shining under bangs. The pounding music thrums in her chest, bass a pulse. It’s warm. Too warm.

Harmon downs the last of the special drink Cleo’s bartender had mixed—and it’s practiced.

It’s practiced in watching her surrogate mother—her _dead_ surrogate mother—taking swings and swings out of steel flasks; it’s practiced in the evenings she’s spent in the same drunken haze ever since the day her mother let her chug a bottle of hotel beer.

Beth swallows and sets the drink down, and lets out an airy, satisfied “ _aaah._ ”

Men are not as reliable as alcohol, after all: none of Beth’s rum or coke tell lies, and the haze never fails her. It didn’t fail her in her downward spiral to a self wallowing bender, no. The bottles never failed her, and they were constant, unlike fucking Harry Beltic at her door one day, or so he says; unlike the calls of goddamn Benny Watts and the hills of his knuckles and his leather jackets, unlike her phone which hung off the receiver, cord dangling. _No_ , liquor was constant, in all that.

It was familiar, like the sixty four squares of a chess board.

A familiar haze, a blush of Dionysus.

Liquor came in to fill gaps that her vast mind couldn’t, liquor helped her drown the green and white pills that she’s had ever since her time at a dusty-floored orphanage, glass jars standing tall behind Mr. Fergusson and his white cups. Glass jars that slipped and broke from her hands, green pills everywhere, a sea of green and white and glass and the same familiar haze overcoming her as she fell, right in front of Mrs. Deardorff and all the other girls.

Today, here, in the middle of a bar underneath her hotel room, she stands up, smoothens the new dress she’d picked out for Cleo.

She glances over at the French girl, who stands, talking to the men on the couches.

If Cleo were a chess piece, Harmon thinks, she’d be a bishop: the cut of her hips, the curled ends of her bobcut—because oh, Cleo is beautiful—of course she is, she stares back at Beth from the front covers of reception magazines, pinched and pulled into place by cameramen and framed to perfection. Cleo stares up at Beth through her eyelashes, ink eyes rimmed with eyeliner. She’s gorgeous, pretty, polished, right down to the tall slant of her cheekbones and the whites of her teeth.

She stands beside Cleo, chats with these important men in their important business suits and chalices of wine held in the space between their fingers.

But in the middle somewhere, Cleo sips her drink, eyes Beth over the rim of her glass.

These lies get old.

Cleo asks, the edge of her accent fascinating— _so_ fascinating, Beth wants to drown in her clipped syllables, wants to taste it—everything about Cleo is fascinating, how she lives everywhere and nowhere at once: she’s fascinating in her telling the story of her survival from suicide and she’s fascinating in the mascara of her long eyelashes.

Cleo asks, “Shall we drop you off to your room?”

And it’s an invitation, somehow—something heavier than one lady helping her friend back to their room, something _more_ —and Beth says yes.

* * *

♕

* * *

“These lies were not interesting at all,” Cleo says.

The lights are off in Harmon’s room. When they opened the door, the beep of a keycard, Beth had stood with it, pushing the door wider. Her smile is an edged out smirk, the red ringlets of her hair a merlot in the dim of the room.

Cleo takes this invitation as well, and it’s like a chess game, a returned move—like trading rooks. Beth purses her lips at the memory of giggling, stupid school girls, talking of _trading rooks_ in a way that Beth hadn't understood, not even with their tittering laughs.

But today Cleo walks in to Beth's hotel room, tall and slender—a bishop, the only piece who dares simply cut cross the slant of the board, diagonally, and if Beth is a queen, she goes both ways.

“No,” Beth returns. “They weren’t.”

The room is dark.

“Lie to me,” Cleo says, and her voice is far too soft for it to just be friendly.

Beth’s stomach twists. The upward turn of her eyebrows, the curve of her chin gleam in the dark. Her face has always been cool angles, clean lines, smooth plains—and perhaps the flutter of her heart is a lie, the way she aches, hopes Cleo finds her beautiful.

 _You can not be a model,_ Cleo had told her, and how Beth’s throat had dropped, thinking Cleo did not find her to be pretty. Of course, Beth is smart—she _knows_ she is smart, hours of beating Mr Shaibel in the chalk-dusted basement of a fucking orphanage she wishes never to go back to, not after crying her eyes dry in Jolene’s arm—

 _Ah, Jolene_ —

Suddenly Cleo’s hand is at the curve of Beth’s waist, and they are standing, toe to toe in this room, and she says, “You are thinking of another man you love, yes?”

And, no, it is not a man, but Beth has been asked to lie. “Yes.”

Cleo is drunk, her eyeliner is smudged, and yet she is gorgeous—Beth wishes to kiss, to lick off the last of Cleo’s eyeliner, and the thought winds up her stomach in ten new ways.

“Boys are pretty,” Cleo says, and her hands find the curls of Harmon’s red hair. “They are pretty, and yet, they are just that. _C’est comme ça_ ,” she runs her fingers through, reaches the back of her head. “It is as is. They are just boys, never men. They never know me.”

Beth cannot breathe.

“You slept with Benny, yes?” And the slant of her accent, the tightness of her _e_ -sounds, _Benny,_ the softness of her tone, this close to Beth, their breaths caught in each other’s face—

“No,” she lies, and she finds a match to Cleo’s breath, stagnating her intakes and they breathe in sync, how she hopes Cleo’s heart matches the thunder of hers as well.

“He didn’t understand you,” she observes. She speaks of Benny as someone who cannot understand intimacy, as something distant, unlike them, unlike—unlike _this_ , unlike the warmth in their faces, the heartbeat that pounds in their ears, unlike this demanding touch, that perhaps Benny cannot read this language: this tender touch, this ghosting breath, this burning gaze.

There is a pause, and Beth can hear the tick of a chess clock as they both think of their next moves: Beth’s folded arms as she watches Cleo’s dark eyes.

Cleo may not know the rules of chess, but she seems to understand this dance, this alternating move.

Finally, Beth choses to slide over a piece. Her voice is cold, hard, as it always is in the few words exchanged in each chess game. “Have you ever kissed another girl?”

“Have you?” Comes the return, and Cleo clicks the clock again, reverses time.

“No,” Beth lies.

She has kissed Jolene, once: after watching two teenagers making out from the terrace of the orphanage, dusting the pair of erasers in her hands, _bang bang bang_ —the roil of chalk powder as she watches the boy keen over his highschool sweetheart, their lips pressed together. _Is it hard to breathe?_ She thinks.

She asks Jolene about it, playing with the hem of her uniform, the matted grey tunic. Jolene offers to teach her. She accepts, and she has her first kiss in a chapel, stained glass slanting red colour over them: she furrows her brows, curious at the sensation, the swimming heat in her belly.

 _“It’s like that,”_ Jolene had said, pulling back, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. _“Gah, cracker, did you have mashed potato?”_

So she lies to Cleo, says no.

She lies, lies, lies, for Cleo. Perhaps these lies are interesting, because as Cleo presses into her, she can feel the thrum of heartbeat through her chest.

Cleo presses her harder, and harder still, and Beth is tensing up everywhere. Cleo kisses her.

And this is not like two church girls in a fucking chapel, Jolene’s plump lips slanted against hers falteringly.

No, this kiss is practiced—picking up pretty boys from bars: or maybe girls, too—this kiss is perfect, even for their drunken selves, the sway of the room around them. This kiss is careful, a press of Cleo’s teeth into the bottom of Beth’s, a slow vacuum, a steadily rising heart like the _tick tick tick tick_ of a chess clock—

Fuck, Beth must make her move, next, and she brings her hands up to the curve of Cleo’s breast.

And then, perhaps a King is knocked down, because Cleo and she find the softness of a mattress, they retire to the hotel bed—they exchange moves, clothes disappearing, the sway of alcohol in their eyes. Probing, open mouthed kisses at the curve of Beth’s thighs, aching kisses at the inseam of her hip bone, and a tantalizing long, _slow_ stripe of Cleo’s tongue, up the length of her opening, to the bundle of nerves.

And it’s an embarrassing white haze after that, her fingers in Cleo’s pageboy hair, stuttered gasps, soft _“there, right there, please,”_ —and the slow rock against her, Cleo standing tall as she pulls one of Beth’s legs over her shoulder, like the rise and sink of the sea, a beat, a slow melody as Beth arches her back, whispers nothings.

Beth stares up at the ceiling, through it all, eyes wide, and she doesn’t see a chess board floating above, doesn’t see columns of chess pieces shifting, she only sees white, mind blanking, brain frying.

There’s an exhausting uncleanliness descending upon her as they both collapse into the duvet of the bed, and Harmon staggers over to the bathroom, draws herself a bath. Her legs are still twitching, she is still all in a rush, and everything crashes upon her in the heat of the bath: a swarm of thoughts.

She is lost, lost and drowning in these lies.

The water around her turns cold.

**Author's Note:**

> lowkey: these thoughts are very shuffled together and not at all streamlined: i like to say its like that for the overall voice that beth has, what with the amount of substance abuse she's done. lots of random, vivid bursts of imagery and flashbacks that take her in the middle of things. but also, this story is also just. very rushed and unedited
> 
> anyway tell me what u thought. as a sapphic i could not let this one slide. how dare u netflix, where the fuck did townes come from. (townes is hot too lmfao hes a golden hour boy i feel u but. but _cleo_.)
> 
> so yes comment n yell at me about how dumb this was


End file.
